NEW YORK – Ali was a 17-year-old killed after allegedly sympathizing with Iranian opposition groups. Ozra, a married woman, was killed after a charge of adultery. And Bahram, 50, was executed for being a member of the Baha’i faith.

To the theocracy that replaced Iran’s monarchy after the 1979 Islamic revolution, these three and thousands more were criminals who deserved to die. To Roya and Ladan Boroumand, they were victims of a justice system without due process, and a crucial part of their homeland’s history that they feel obliged to expose.

On Friday, the two sisters unveiled what is believed to be the largest database dedicated to those executed under the Islamic regime. It is the result of years of examining human rights reports, media accounts, memoirs and other records. Of the more than 9,400 cases cataloged, one has a special place in the sisters’ hearts: that of their father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, whose leadership in resistance movements is believed to have led to his murder.

The Boroumand sisters, who live in Washington, D.C., hope their work will serve as a tool for Iranians who want to deal with the country’s history. The database’s release coincides with the 25th anniversary of the release of 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

“In the Third World and Iran, we really have not had a democracy; we are used to just going ahead and pushing the dirt under the rug and not looking at it,” said Roya Boroumand, 45. “If we want to have a real transition to democracy, we need to look at what has happened to us and what we have done.”

The database comes at a time of increased tension between the West and Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly called for the eradication of Israel, and Iran recently resumed uranium-enrichment activities, which the U.S. and Europe fear takes the country a step closer to having nuclear weapons.

In the early days of the revolution, the Boroumand sisters, who were studying in France, had great hopes for the new government. But time spent in Iran, where they heard accounts of speedy trials and mass executions, disillusioned them.

“A sense of shame and guilt overwhelmed me,” Ladan Boroumand, 48, said of those days.

For years afterward, while living in France, their family was involved in Iranian resistance efforts. In 1991, their father, a social democrat who was a leader of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, was stabbed to death in his Paris apartment building, presumably by agents of the Iranian government.

“You theoretically know that people suffer,” Roya Boroumand said. “But when it happens to you, you feel it, you sleep with it, you wake up with it.”

A decade after his death, the women, both of whom have doctorates in history, decided to harness the power of the Internet – and its popularity in Iran – to set up the database.

They incorporated a foundation named after their father, began to scour through records, secured some money and relied on a “virtual staff” in various countries to help.

They chose to include anyone who had been executed through Iran’s courts since the revolution; the entries do not take sides on a person’s guilt or innocence.

A message seeking comment was left with Iranian officials at the United Nations. No one answered the phones at the Iranian interests section, which operates under the umbrella of the Pakistani Embassy, in Washington, D.C.

Regan Ralph, executive director of the Fund for Global Human Rights, said she wasn’t aware of any other database so “carefully and comprehensively prepared. It is a critical step toward making it impossible for the government of Iran to deny its role in human rights abuses.”

The memorial database, available in English and Persian and called “Omid” (hope in Persian), paints a wide-ranging but admittedly incomplete picture of the people who were killed, especially in the immediate years after the fall of the shah. The secretive judicial process makes it difficult to ascertain the charges victims faced.

“We cannot replace an official investigation,” Roya Boroumand said. “That’s why we always insist that what we’re doing is symbolic. We just want to initiate a debate. This is the first step to encourage a truth and reconciliation commission.”

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